Although many robust methods exist for motion computation, the iterative motion analysis proposed by Lucas and Kanade [1] still dominates the field of motion analysis. It is widely used both for parametric motion computations (for example by [2,3,4]) and for object tracking [5]. The popularity of the LK method is due to its simplicity and stability (see for example [6]).
We will refer to the various applications which use the Lucas-Kanade method as ‘LK’, although the original application addressed by [1] was mainly stereo computation.
An important component of the LK method is the iterative convergence to an accurate solution while using linear approximations. The more iterations that are required, the more computer resources are needed. These computer resources manifest themselves as computer memory and computer processing time or a combination of both. Therefore, it is desirable to reduce the number of iterations required by the LK method so as to reduce the computer resources required to achieve convergence.